9/11: A Decade Remembered

We were discussing the dictatorial aspirations of Napoleon the pig. And then we weren't.

The phone rang. Our teacher picked up and mumbled a word or two before his eyes fixated on the back cubbys, gaze similar to one worn by victims of a half-court buzzer beater.

"Holy shit, the Twin Towers just collapsed."

Our collective eleven-year old ears placed far more emphasis on the first part of the sentence -- Mr. Davis just cursed; perhaps we would be able to parlay his hiccup into extended recess time -- than the second.

Even as I digested the sentence in its entirety, my juvenile egocentric brain was unable to grasp its consequences, and my initial reaction was excitement at the potential swap of class for the playground (ironically, I was the last to be picked up; my mom reasoned that an all-boys choir school on the opposite end of the island was the safest possible place for me).

Then my classmate, Tommy, began to cry. I was no stranger to tears -- heck, I had produced plenty just an hour earlier when caught flushing my classmate's spelling homework down the toilet -- but Tommy's tears were different. They were accompanied by virulent shaking and choppy gasps for air. Tommy's father worked on the 98th floor of the building. I had never witnessed someone cry for a life before.

Perhaps aware of my struggle to comprehend the ramifications of that morning, my mom took me down to ground zero the following evening for a first-hand view of the carnage. Aside from the obvious -- the 'Missing' posters, the mushroom cloud of dust which enveloped every name-street -- what struck me were the stacks of papers, rudely removed from their desks thousands of feet above by an avalanche of steel and fire and death, yet still whiter and crisper than a brand new pair of Air Force Ones.

My mom had to work that night, and it was just me and the television. I was never one for talking sponges and mischievous bunnies, but ESPN and MTV were stuck on the faces of Osama Bin Laden and Mohammed Atta (the man who drove the first plane into the tower), and those faces scared the crap out of me. So did the talk of the anthrax, and the Empire State Building.